League of Gentlemen's Apocalypse - Reece Shearsmith

Compiled by: Jack Foley

Q. Was it easier playing yourselves in the film?
A. It was the thing we took out most from the script
stage. People that read it, the one comment that most came back
to us with was that it was too self referential, there was too
much of us in it, and we were suspicious of doing that anyway
so we swapped round the idea of the film, because it could have
been the other way round and we encounter our characters through
our eyes, but we realised that the right way round to do it was
let the characters see us, and we remain quite shadowy figures,
and it's through their journey and their peril that they experience
us.

Q. How did you get Michael Sheen to play Jeremy?
A: It just seemed right, we thought it would be a great
way to start the film with this pre-title `Scream' type section
where he apparently dies and he really pitched it in the right
way I think for the film and the world we create.
It's quiet difficult for actors to come in and do our kind of
screen acting with us, sometimes with David Warner, he didn't
deliver the line like we imagined David Warner delivering the
line when we'd written for him. So we'd say 'Do it like David
Warner'.

Q. What in your past did you drawer on to feed the humour?
A: The film within the film, the 1690 film, was like
something we've already watched, Hammer House, something like
that.

Q. Did you film your doubles using women?
A: They're in it quite a lot but you hardly see them,
it's seamless, which is one of the galling things - you spend
so much time and energy being in the same room as ourselves and
yet you don't even question it when you see it.

Q. When you wrote this film
did you assume the audience would know all the characters?
A: You couldn't do a film relying on the fact that only
the however many million people that watch the TV programme will
watch the film. We wanted it to be a comedy film in its own right
and the idea that some characters realize that they're characters
in a comedy programme was a gettable concept regardless of whether
the programme in question pre-existed.

Q. What would you say to those who think you're the real
deal and Little Britain can only dream?
A: I've always thought we've been outside the comedy
world, not deliberately, but we regard ourselves as actors, not
in a snooty way, but we've come from that background and not from
the whole circuit of comedy stand-up. They're people that we know
now but they are already part of their world.

Q. What's next for you?
A: I'm about to start As
You Like It with Sienna Miller and Helen McCrory, and Sean
Hughes. It runs for three months and then we've got our tour to
write.

Q. Will there be another series of League of Gentlemen?
A: We've always tried to push into another direction
and not tread water, that's why each series we've tried to make
a bold move, especially with the third series, which was very
different from the first two. Inherently you want to keep doing
what people like, but the film allows us to do something we've
never been able to do before with the self-awareness thing.

Q. Have you ever been censored... told that's going too
far?
A: I think we're very responsible, from the first series
we've been very aware that we are going out in people's homes.
When there's four of us, we are very rigorous in what we allow
through.